July 2010

“Magento is a stunningly powerful e-commerce platform. In this miniseries, we’ll learn how to get started with the platform, get to know the terminologies, set up a store and all related aspects of it and finally learn how to customize it to make it our very own.

“In this sixth part, we’ll be building one of the most reader requested feature: getting a featured product slider in the home page. Excited? Let’s get started!”

… Nine months after launching Psdtuts+, it was time to expand out the clearly successful formula to other types of tutorials. Beginning with web development and Nettuts+, we launched over the course of two years a total of seven more sites. Each one applies the same overall editorial concept into a different niche, with a different editor and different writers.

The plus side of this is that the Tuts+ franchise as a whole has now grown far beyond just Photoshop tutorials. The down side is that whenever our revenue looked like it was going to pass costs, we would launch a new site driving our costs up again.

Web designers make an average of $35,000 per year. Some make more, some make less. The reason why most web designers do not make six figure incomes is simple: they are great web designers, but they are not great businessmen and businesswomen. As the owner of WebDesignDev, I want to share with all of my loyal WebDesignDev readers how you can make a LOT more money as a web designer by following 5 simple steps. Before I begin, I want to remind you: if you don’t take action, you can’t succeed. The sooner you’ll start thinking outside the box and doing something to increase your income as a web designer, the sooner it will happen.

Unconventional Sources of Design Inspiration

Generally designers and graphic artists get their inspiration from sites such as Deviant Art and the Behance network. Of course blogs are also constantly pumping out inspiration posts that provide plenty of daily inspiration.

However, if you’re taking your inspiration from solely online means then it can really limit your creativity. Today I’m going to discuss some of my favorite methods of inspiration, that will help get you away from your computer screen and boost your creativity!

A creative truly mind blowing collection of high quality photo manipulation showcase of inspiration. Photo manipulation is what Photoshop was designed especially for so as well a showcasing awesome inspiration this is also a showcase of what designs can be created using Photoshop as well as other additional programs.

“I hear this CSS3 thing is all the rage. Resources are flying around the tutorial world and blogosphere providing brilliant examples of creative new ways to design using CSS3 modules. However, it’s easy to over-implement and lose the brilliant subtlety of great user interfaces. Here are three quick tips for using powerful CSS3 techniques in subtle ways.”

“We’re back with the second entry in the Nettuts+ Q&A series. Today, we discuss the difference between LESS and Sass, how to pass server-side values to your JavaScript, how to work with PHP and cookies, and the HTML5 doctype. Here we go!”

“Creative designers can do some amazing things with jQuery. A wide variety of animation effects are possible, and these 35 tutorials provide excellent learning resources for anyone who is wanting to brush up their skills in this area. You’ll find tutorials for creative animated navigation menus, as well as for other types of animation that use jQuery instead of Flash.”

There are many techniques for photo manipulation that are being used by lots of today’s designers in order to create stunning visually creative works of art. It is most common in designers of graphics who choose to use Adobe Photoshop. The main benefit of this is the fact that once the key factors of photo manipulation are understood, anything you can imagine is possible to digitally modify and to reconstruct.

The most imaginative to the most minimalist ideas can be conveyed through Photoshop using photo manipulation. I will now review ten of what I believe, are the most successful methods for photo manipulation (in no particular order of importance).

30 Light Effect Wallpapers to Liven Up Your Desktop

Photoshop light effects have been incredibly popular for years, and the community is full of great tutorials and photo manipulations using these effects. However, I don’t often see many great wallpapers using these light effects.

Seeing as light effects look so damn good and seem to inspire a lot of people, it only seems right to display more of them on your desktop! Today we bring you 30 wallpapers showcasing stunning light effects, to really liven up your desktops.

Step 1

A large collection of only the best top quality 100 design tutorials which will teach you how to use Photoshop in order to manipulate photography, this large reference point showcases every aspect which is essential for creating good photo manipulation with each tutorial having an awesome outcome.

Resources Needed:

“Every workman needs a good toolbox, and web developers are no different. PHP helper functions are designed to speed up and homogenise repetitive tasks, and make your life that much easier. This first tutorial explains how to make link helpers that will improve your methods for adding hyperlinks and mailto links in your web applications.”

LeChuck’s Revenge: a very Monkey Island inspired cel shading tutorial

Ye be warned: This tutorial is NOT FOR BEGINNERS, it’s for people who know their way around Photoshop and are looking to further their design knowledge/skills. If you aren’t comfortable with radial gradients, overlay layers and clipping mask layers and have a good foundation level of artistic skill this tutorial probably isn’t for you. Oh, and you should definitely have a graphics tablet; it would be grog induced folly to try this with a mouse!

Today’s blog post we have decided to do a massive collection of 99 icon sets which can each be used within commercial design projects. This compilation was put together simply because of the lack of free icon sets which are available to be used in commercial design projects, what’s the point creating an icon set if its not free to use ?

A great blog post of high quality icon sets which is a greate reference to bookmark for future reference. This post was time consuming putting together therefore any comments on your thoughts about the article would defiantly be really appreciated.

I wrote an Article on “How the Xbox 360 is a great budget video game console for a poor gamer, but wants to play Current Generation games on the Xbox 360 Arcade like Fable 2, and Forza 2. I … Continue reading →

A file hosting web site, an online file storage provider, or a ‘cyberlocker’ is known as internet hosting service which is created to host large files. Internet users are keen in sharing files worldwide and also use it as a remote back up or virtual storage.

Sharing has never been much faster and easier compared to conventional methods of file sharing which were more time consuming and costly. Here are 20 file sharing sites to share almost any type of files with anyone you want all over the world.

The EnterUpload file hosting provider offers an online storage and remote backup capacity with sophisticated downloading and uploading tools. Users can host files, audios, videos, images, and flash at the same place. Personal data can also be accessed from a variety of computers without the need of carrying around a USB drive of hard disk.

In the past, if you wanted to have an HTML entity to have a gradient background you created in image of a gradient and displayed it in the entity using the background-image attribute in CSS. With the evolution of browsers and CSS/HTML, this is no longer the case. In this tutorial we will learn how to use CSS to add a linear gradient to the background of entities.

The Setup

First, we need to decide how we are going to use the gradient. I suggest using the gradient as an enhancement. Keep in mind that some browsers will not display the gradient well or at all. So you will want it to degrade gracefully. If the browser doesn’t display the gradient the design should still be excellent and not require the gradient in order to function.

Gradients can be applied to block elements such as DIV tags. We will be using a simple DIV tag in this example.

Wow a very exiting month for June 2010 with the new over anticipated wordpress 3.0 finally being released, alongside with a tone of design tutorials as well as fresh web design related articles for you to enjoy which are worth reading.